Giada De Laurentiis' Best Tips For Cooking The Perfect Pasta From Giadzy

Giada De LaurentiisPhoto byGiadzy.com

Italian Chef Giada De Laurentiis has some really great tips for cooking the perfect pasta from her website Giadzy. The Emmy Award-winning chef, mother, entrepreneur, author, and television personality tells us about the dos and don'ts for cooking pasta at home. Here are a few important things I wanted to share with you from her website.

For the full list of tips please go to The Dos and Don'ts of Cooking Pasta. A very important step in the pasta making process starts at the beginning. Giada says she ''first boils her water before adding salt to it. "Add a lot of salt," she said. "Make it taste like the sea." Then, after the pasta has cooked, she scoops it out of the water instead of straining it.'' The one thing you don't want to do is add oil. The pasta won't need it as it has it's own natural starch from cooking and slippery pasta won't hold sauce well.

The founder of Giadzy and Giada Catering also talks about the different pots needed for different size pasta. Giada has a rule about that and shares it with her readers ''Long pastas like fettuccine or pappardelle need lots of room to swim. Crowding those strands into a shorter pot is the surest way to get them to stick together and cook unevenly. Use your tallest pot and plenty of water, and bring it to a rolling boil to keep the pasta moving as it cooks.''

You also don't want to rinse your pasta after it's cooked, as it takes all the natural starch away. You should save some of the water from the pot the pasta was cooked in and then add your sauce immediately. ''It's important to not strain the pasta into a colander in the sink, since Giada uses a ladleful of still-boiling water to help emulsify the sauce and bind it to the pasta,'' another important tip she shares with Eating Well.